DOWNTOWN — Saturday night's shooting near Millennium Park left a man dead and many children horrified as they played nearby.
Carmen Ortiz-Arce was with two of her children and a young niece and nephew at Crown Fountain when Paul Pagan allegedly shot Peter Fabbri near the Michigan Avenue tourist attraction.
The shooter, Ortiz-Arce said, was on a bicycle harassing any woman he saw near the familiar faces fountains before getting into an argument with Fabbri that turned deadly.
"I don't know what the hell [Pagan] was saying," Ortiz-Arce, of Dunning, said. "He was harassing women and that was it."
Fabbri, 54, was leaving a "gourmet food and wine tasting event" with his mother and girlfriend before the fight.
Prosecutors said Tuesday that Pagan intervened in an argument between Fabbri and a religious group before shoving Fabbri, pulling out a .22 caliber revolver, and shooting him in the head and stomach. A woman tried to keep Pagan from fleeing on a bicycle, but Pagan's own girlfriend — who was with five of her own children — struck the Good Samaritan.
RELATED: Millennium Park Shooter Killed Man In Front Of Girlfriend's 5 Kids: Charges
Police found Pagan five minutes later, but the shooting left an indelible mark on Ortiz-Arce and her children. Her oldest daughter, 17, hasn't been to school since the shooting.
"She's traumatized," Ortiz-Arce said.
And her 4-year-old daughter "just repeats what she saw."
"She doesn't understand it," Ortiz-Arce said. "She's like 'remember that guy with the tattoo on his head?'"
The killing was perhaps the highest-profile this year Downtown, where murders are already more than double last year's total. Local pols say they'll add police and police body cameras to the department's Central District in an attempt to curb the troubling trend.
But those efforts may be too late for Ortiz-Arce, who's lived in Chicago her whole life but may move her family to Arizona because of the city's violence.
Before her children saw a man get murdered near Millennium Park, they heard that another get killed at a gas station near their home.
"And that's scary, it's literally down the block from my house," Ortiz-Arce said.
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